Madeline Sayet is a Mohegan director, playwright, and scholar who believes the stories we pass down shape our collective possible futures. Her accolades include being named a MacDowell Fellow, Hermitage Fellow, TED Fellow, MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, Native American NCAIED 40 Under 40, Connecticut Magazine 40 Under 40, and a recipient of the White House Champion of Change Award from President Obama. She is a resident artist at Centre Theatre Group in Los Angeles and a member of Long Wharf Theatre’s artistic ensemble. As both a Shakespearean director and scholar, she serves as Clinical Associate Professor in the English Department at Arizona State University with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). She served six years as Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP), where she ran an annual new Native play festival and created programming to uplift the next generation of Native theatre artists.
Her play Where We Belong, first performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, completed a national tour produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library, with performances at venues including The Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, Seattle Rep, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Baltimore Center Stage, Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Portland Center Stage, Philadelphia Theatre Company, and the Folger Theatre. Where We Belong is published by both Methuen Drama and Dramatists Play Service. Her other plays include The Fish (O’Neill Finalist; National Jewish Playwriting Contest Finalist), The Last Laugh, Up and Down the River, The Knife, and The Neverland, which will appear in a new anthology of Native theatre from Methuen Drama in 2026. She has also directed two short films for the Mohegan Nation: Flying Bird’s Diary, about the last fluent speaker of the Mohegan language, and Up and Down the River, about the first Native soldier to die in the Revolutionary War.